Civility Online
When I launched this blog almost a year ago I made a vow to remain civil. I hope I've adhered to the ten tenets of that manifesto, but I'm sure I've fallen short at times. Still, it's clear to anyone that the Internet isn't the most civil of places.
The first time I was a victim of an online attack was in the early 1990s on a Usenet discussion board on The X-Files (yes, I was a real geek). Then, as now, I used my own name online. Someone using an anonymous handle started attacking me mercilessly for some trivial thing; I think he had a different theory on who the "smoking man" was. Another Usenet veteran, Mike Godwin, had a law named after him (among cybergeeks anyway) that says as a flame war goes on the probablility of someone being called a Nazi approaches one. So this isn't new.
But in this era of e-mail, listservs and blogs, it seems the flames are hotter than ever. Why? I've never been called a Nazi to my face, no matter how heated a discussion got, and in the world of think tanks, discussions can get very heated indeed. The New York Times has an answer and it has a lot to do with brain chemistry, as well as the unique characteristics of online communication. You can read more in my blog entry on IPCentral.
